Food Assistance

For a family with no reliable income, a month's food is the difference between stability and crisis. Helping Aid Foundation provides food assistance, cash support, clothing, shelter and essential services to poor families, widows, orphans, elderly persons, persons with disabilities, and other vulnerable populations.

Support is delivered directly and with dignity. Alongside monthly distributions, we run seasonal winter relief campaigns and dedicated support for orphans and widows in the communities where we work.

Over 1,540 families in Dera Ismail Khan District currently receive support through this programme. The distribution is monthly rather than occasional, and that is the part that matters most. A single food parcel helps a household for a few days. A ration a family knows is coming again next month is what lets them stop selling what little they own to cover the gap.

Priority goes to households with no reliable earner: widows, orphans, elderly people living alone, and people with disabilities who cannot work. These are the families least able to absorb a bad month, and the ones most often missed when aid is handed out to whoever is easiest to reach.

Cash assistance runs alongside the food distribution. Food covers the need every household shares, but the most urgent cost in any given month differs from family to family. It may be a school fee, a prescription, a rent arrear or a repair. Cash lets the family decide, which is usually a better decision than one made on their behalf.

Winter is treated as a separate campaign. Cold weather in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa turns a survivable shortage into a dangerous one, and adds costs a household has not budgeted for. Winter relief covers those needs at the point in the year when a family is least able to meet them.

Every distribution is made directly to the family, in person. Nothing in the programme requires a household to prove hardship in public or accept help in a way that costs them their standing in their own community.